Newbie database question

This is my first post to this forum, and its very much a newbie question ...

I have been in the software industry for a while, but I'm fairly new to the java world. I have some knowledge in the area of SQL and to a lesser degree JDBC.

In my leisure time, I'm part of a very small non-profit/hobby type of group. Our group would like to set up a pretty simple database application that we would like to access over the internet through either a web browser or a simple java client. And although our data probably isn't of much interest to anyone, we would like access to the database to be "secure". I use that term loosely.

How hard can it be? (famous last words)

Since I'm the "technical person" in the group, their all looking at me to solve this. At this point, I'm just trying to figure out how many and which books and internet articles I need to spend all of my time wading through. Any pointers in this area would be most appreciated even if its general topics. Trying to figure out where to find the appropriate information is at least 6/5 of the battle (improper fraction intended).

If you want access to your database to be secure: define a user/password.

If you want a webapplication to use this database, the best way is to define datasource in the webserver(with user/password), the webapplication then will only have to know the name of this datasource.

I you want access to this webapplication to be secure: you can define this in the web.xml file (this is a required file for any Java-webapplication) and in your webserver. This way, only authorised people can use your webapplication

If you want the connection between browser and webserver to be secure: use https instead of http (you can define this in the webserver). This way, nobody can read the data that get sent between browser and server.

If you want a free tool that comes with a database and with webserver: get Netbeans. It also has a lot of good tutorials to help you get started.